A rant about family

@resasour (378)
United States
March 10, 2007 6:41am CST
Ok, I need to rant and rave. I come from a large family. I am the second oldest of 5 children. Here is the problem. My mother passed away last year after being extremely ill for 3 years. During this time I lived about 800 miles away from my parents and my siblings all lived two hours or less from them, yet they never came over to help my dad take care of my mom. My dad retired early to care for her full time. He took good care of her but not the house or the yard. He is 67 yrs old and has emphysema, and bad knees, so he is not able to do much. During the three years that my mom was so sick, I traveled to them and stayed a couple of months, spring cleaning their house, painting and cleaning up the yard. Since my mom passed away, my dad has been severely depressed and doesn't do much of anything. What bothers me so much about all of this is that my brothers and sisters all think it is perfectly ok for me to drive 800 miles to come and take care of my mom and dad, yet they are "too busy" all the time to help out. Since my mom passed away, they have been to see my dad maybe once every other month. I get up here to help him and after having only been gone a year, I find the house in total disarray. Granted, my dad is not much of a housekeeper, my mom always took care of that, so I wasn't expecting too much anyhow, but I was appalled when I got here. I called my brothers and sisters and raked them all over the coals about it. They all gave me a bunch of excuses about how busy they were and I lost my cool. Now, I think they are all mad at me and none of them have been calling or coming by to see Dad. I am not from here, I am from Florida. My life is in Florida. My kids (now grown) are there and my grandchild, and now I just find out I have another grandchild on the way. I want to go back to Florida, and back to my life, but my dad does not want to go,and I can't trust that my siblings will check in on him and take care of him and his house so that it doesn't fall apart around him. We don't have the money to hire in outside help and I am beyond angry with my siblings for letting me and my dad down. The same way they let my mom down by not coming to help care for her when she was so ill. I am continuing to try to talk my dad into coming back to Florida with me, but I understand why he wants to stay here. My mom is buried here, and she and him shared the house together until she died last year. Anyone got any idea on how I can get my siblings to understand that they need to make my dad a priority and help him out so that i can return home? They all would much rather I just stay here with my dad, but I really want to go back to my life and my family too. Well, i do feel better getting it off my chest. But I really don't know what to do now. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
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